Tina Turner Documentary Reaches for Pain and Glory however Falls

One of essentially the most well-known traces from Tina Turner’s profession got here in her introduction to the model of John Fogerty’s “Proud Mary” launched by Ike & Tina Turner in 1971. “We by no means ever do nothing good and straightforward,” she stated in a sultry snarl. “We at all times do it good and tough.”

“Tina,” the documentary about Turner that premiered on the 2021 Berlin International Film Festival, has moments the place it tries to be good and straightforward, sliding over tough parts in Turner’s life in an try to discover a celebratory tone. But the movie, too, principally settles for good and tough, which inserts a lady who says within the movie, “It wasn’t a good life. It was in some areas, but the goodness didn’t overcome the bad.”

The unhealthy is usually wrapped up within the years Tina Turner spent together with her mentor, Svengali and abusive husband, Ike, whose darkish shadow hangs over the whole movie. But whereas the story is horrifying at instances, shifting at different instances and sometimes thrilling as Tina’s personal energy emerges, “Tina” additionally feels curiously truncated and incomplete. Directors Dan Lindsay and T.J. Martin, who received an Oscar for the terrific high-school soccer documentary “Undefeated” and extra just lately the immersive Los Angeles riots chronicle “LA 92,” have made a doc that at all times feels a bit faraway from its topic, as if Turner wasn’t absolutely dedicated to going by way of all of it once more.

“Tina” features a video interview with Turner shot at her dwelling in Zurich in 2019, however a lot of what she says about her previous doesn’t come from that dialog. Instead, it’s drawn from audiotapes of a People journal interview she did in 1981, when she revealed for the primary time how Ike beat her, and of periods she did with author Kurt Loder when he co-authored her autobiography within the mid-1980s.

Apart from the archival footage, with its priceless performances from TV exhibits and concert events, the movie is stylized and more and more melodramatic: The interview topics are shot in imposing settings, often sitting in chairs in massive rooms with ornate furnishings and distant partitions. “Tina” is fascinated by empty areas, with the digital camera ceaselessly panning down empty hallways and floating by way of rooms the place issues may need occurred.

The story, although, is harrowing. Turner, born Anna Mae Bullock in rural Tennessee, grew to become a fan of Ike Turner’s Kings of Rhythm whereas nonetheless a young person, and started singing with them in 1957. At first, she and Ike had a brother-sister kind of relationship (and he or she had a baby with one other band member). But by the early ’60s, she and Ike had married and he modified her title to Tina Turner.

The abuse, she stated, began early of their relationship: Ike would beat her with coat hangers, have intercourse together with her afterward after which drive her to go onstage. Caught up in what she says was “guilt and fear,” she went together with it and didn’t attempt to get away.

While these years produced some landmark recordings, together with the monumental Phil Spector manufacturing “River Deep – Mountain High,” which Spector recorded with out Ike within the studio, the movie’s examination of the music itself is cursory. Instead, the primary two sections of the movie — the primary one titled “Ike & Tina,” the second “Family” — deal with Ike’s brutality, and at last on her escape, when she walked out of a Dallas resort room, checked right into a Ramada Inn with solely the garments on her again and left him virtually every part within the ensuing divorce.

The third part of the movie, “Comeback,” finds Turner doing cabaret exhibits and enjoying Las Vegas earlier than she’s rescued by supervisor Roger Davies, who engineered the profession resurgence that started with the 1984 album “Private Dancer” and its huge, Grammy-winning hit “What’s Love Got to Do With It.” A video of the unique, horrible model of the tune by the British pop floor Bucks Fizz is likely one of the few bits of levity in “Tina.”

But whenever you suppose that her profession is on the upswing and…